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Recipe for disaster

14 November 1998

By Jon Copley

MOST of Honduras and large parts of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala lie
devastated after their encounter with Hurricane Mitch. Yet meteorologically,
Mitch was not a record breaker. What made it the most destructive Atlantic storm
for decades, say experts familiar with the region, was a deadly combination of
local geography and poverty.

As Mitch brewed in the Caribbean, it briefly became the fourth deepest
depression ever recorded in the Atlantic region, with an atmospheric pressure at
its centre of just 905 millibars. The record is 888 millibars, held by Hurricane
Gilbert, which hit the coast of Mexico in September 1988 and killed more than
300 people before blowing itself out.

By the time Mitch hit the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, however, it had
been officially downgraded to a tropical storm, with a pressure of 994 millibars
and maximum wind speeds of around 97 kilometres per hour. “It was one of the
most powerful hurricanes in the region for some time, but not when it made
landfall,” says Lixion Avila of the National Hurricane Center in Miami,
Florida.

The problems came when Mitch hit Central America’s mountainous terrain. Its
moisture-rich air cooled as it was forced upwards, unleashing a deluge that
obliterated entire villages and left more than 24 000 people dead or missing,
and a million homeless. Mitch also lingered over the region, prolonging the
destruction.

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More than 600 millimetres of rain fell in the mountains of Honduras in a
single day. But that alone can’t be blamed for the catastrophe. “The crucial
thing is removing vegetation—if you take that out of the system, you’ve
lost the natural bonding and the area will be prone to gully erosion and mass
movement,” says Paul Gostelow, a soil erosion specialist at the British
Geological Survey in Keyworth who has surveyed river catchments in Honduras. “A
lot of land has been cleared for grazing and building, and slopes are steep,
making the area typical for landsliding.”

So could the disaster have been predicted? Surveys can pinpoint likely sites
for landslides, says Gostelow. “Knowing the geology, topography and past and
present land use can give a clue to the areas most at risk,” he suggests.
“Perhaps in the future people will sit down and produce maps looking at land
use. Some bits of ground are best left alone.”

But this may not be an option for Central American countries, where poverty
forces many people to live in substandard dwellings in dangerous areas. “People
build where they want to build, with little awareness of hazards,” says David
Jones, a human geographer at the London School of Economics. “In this case we
had a lot of rain combined with an economy and society just not geared up to
cope.”